@thrifty7
They shut down Acorn by fabricating a video, and spreading the made-up video as far as possible using Fox News. Since then that same person has been arrested for trespassing twice attempting to repeat that act.

If you listen to Glen Beck he constantly talks about shutting down people he disagrees with, driving them out of business or politics. He has inspired at least one attempted shooting spree. There have also been the curb-stomping at Rand Paul's rally, the gas line cut at Tom Perriello's brother's house after a blogger mistakenly posted his address as the Representative's, and at least 10 politicians offices vandalized after Mike Vanderboegh urged his readers to throw bricks through their windows.

This is besides all the talk of "second-amendment solutions". If anything, 4chan is mild in comparison, and far less successful. Unlike Acorn, Scientology is still going strong.

@Beth A.
"""
"The young tea party" wasn't meant to be a complement. If you think the tea party is any more cohesive, constructive or polite than 4chan I think you are giving the tea party too much credit."""

There is a difference.

The members of 4chan that participated in the attacks against Paypal, Mastercard, etc have broken the law. It is very likely that a fair number of them will face legal action. This would not be the first time either. Denial of service attacks against businesses have been conducted by members of 4chan for quite some time now. This is a criminal activity. They have no right to sabotage the businesses of others.

That is why I referred to 4chan as a hive of anarchists. They do what they do out of the combination of a willful disregard for all authority and a desire to be amused.

In contrast, the Tea Party is a group of conservative activists that is simply making use of the right to free speech. While you may disagree with what they say and how they say it, you cannot reasonably deny their ability to speak. This isn't a political point. Whether you like the Tea Party or not, they are law abiding citizens that are taking advantage of their right to free speech.

You are free to correct me, but I am not aware of any businesses being shutdown are damaged by members of the Tea Party. Surely, you are able to see the difference between peaceful political discussion and attacks against a private business?

We discussed the effects of new information technology on politics several years ago at Democracy in America (here, 20 March 2007 – a redesign of The Economist website destroyed the original formatting).

The new technology is removing the ability of the ruling elite to control the flow of information, just as the printing press did in the 16th century.

If this parallel holds, we may expect to see a “Secular Reformation” which will sweep away the antiquated forms of government that many people naively believe to be immutable.

kid destroyer is teh_correct. Go there if you want to understand what anon and 4chan are. Whenever I read anything in the media attempting to explain it, it mostly sounds like grandpa trying to set the VCR clock.

"Just imagine the kind of damage that could be caused by a more mainstream version of these attacks."

For all practical purposes this already exists in the form of botnets, although the computers involved are generally recruited via a virus of some sort rather then by their owner's consent. Bot herders can then manipulate their minions into sending massive amounts of spam (probably the most common use) and ddosing whatever someone will pay them to.

Dr Robert has summed up the situation pretty nicely I think. Another point is that it's not like this is a group that has suddenly surged up in outrage over this issue, they're always in the background rabbling about something or other (see the scientology issue cited earlier in this thread) and we really only hear about it when their pet issue coincides with something the larger world cares about.

Heh, I find articles about the Anons funny. They aren't really that intimidating. They are just a bunch of script kiddies that gather on 4chan(which btw isn't the horrible society corroding website everyone makes it out to be but that's another conversation) or other websites (IRC included). For those not in the know, Script kiddies is a derogatory term for computer users who do not know how to really hack (or program for that matter), but use other peoples tools with GUIs to coordinate attacks in numbers. For DDoS attacks they usually simultaneously fire up their Lower Orbital Ion Cannons, really just a little program to flood traffic. All this can really do is take down a website temporarily and cause headaches for sysadmins.
They have other tools, like they can surge internet polls (see Times Most Influential list and Marblecakealsothegame), or plaster porn all over youtube. Their power is in numbers, but that doesn't mean that much. They aren't master hackers that can infiltrate real business, and I wouldn't worry about them disrupting real business.
Really they can only signal disapproval. And provide as hosts for wikileaks documents, but Wikileaks has plenty of storage servers that are in no threat of being shut down.

I'm with Beth on this one. I don't see Anon as pure anarchists as much as iconoclasts who are motivated by entertainment-value and self-satisfaction.

Oh sure, there'll be a few fringe members who dream of listening to "Where is my mind?" while the buildings come crashing down. But most of them, I'm sure, enjoy the fruits of modern society and are confident that nothing they do will actually affect their personal comfort.

Anonymous may be a bit troubling but it's not nearly as worrying as the state-sponsored campaign of persecution against Wikileaks, which has not yet been convicted of any crime, no matter how many people disapprove of it.

@thrifty7 "The young tea party" wasn't meant to be a complement. If you think the tea party is any more cohesive, constructive or polite than 4chan I think you are giving the tea party too much credit.

While Anon may be getting semi-positive coverage today because of these actions, I have to wonder how different would be if they were portrayed (properly) as the "enforcement arm" of 4chan. Maybe Babbage can next cruise around to 4chan and investigate. I would highly recommend that he not do so on a work computer, or at least clearly state that it's work related beforehand!

As for another commentor's point about China; I can't specifically recall if Anon has done so, but I do now that the hacking community has a fairly rich history of messing with Great Firewall of China, going back to the Cult of the Dead Cow.

@Beth A.
"They are the young tea party. They are mostly white, mostly from middle- or upper-middle class backgrounds, mostly living of government subsidies (school or college loans, in their case, instead of Medicare), and mostly generically angry at people who believe they have authority or who think themselves more important than members of Anonymous."

You (and everyone else) are really giving this group way to much credit. As "kid destroyer" already sagely noted, Anonymous == 4chan. 4chan itself is basically as close as you can get to anarchy in its purest form.